INTELLIGENCE

Many times in my work, I come in contact with a client’s lifelong experience of how the intelligence that shapes the circumstances of their life, views them through images, sensations, memory, or emotional experience. This intelligence can be recalled in the present, or in the past. Often, this is the same intelligence that provided the decrees and stories of the Old and New Testament. The intelligence that instructed Abraham and Job is demanding, judgmental, and demands sacrifice. It provides rules and instructions on how to live and behave among a group of potentially hostile strangers. It is a collective image that rose out of humanity from its deep interior while small groups of nomad hunter gatherers, composed of family members and chosen friends came in from the wilderness to create city-states where they could grow their own food, shepherd their own animals, and collaborate with larger numbers of people, many of whom they did not know. This intelligence provided laws and judgements designed to protect strangers from one another’s selfish impulses.

The intelligence that is revealed by the Old and New Testament sprung right out of the collective unconscious of a nascent civilization. It is an intelligence statement that desired to reject the challenge of unending daily chaos that surviving in nature required, for a fantasized order resulting from civilization controlling the behavior of its members. This is a decree of laws, structure, right and wrong, and punishment. This intelligence requires a socialized religion, as humanity’s greatest challenge changed from the ambivalence of nature, to the ambitions of other humans living in limited spaces, competing for limited resources.

This intelligence rules with a double edged sword. It provides rules and regulations, and knows that transgressions against one’s neighbor, might release chaos in the human psyche that had been penned up since humans structured civilization. Its laws protected humans from their basest instincts, and their most selfish desires. But these same laws also block people from their deepest and most profound states of consciousness, and superimposed the laws of a strict and punishing intelligence over the structure of a loving and supportive one.

In the deeper levels of consciousness this intelligence warns about transgressing past its historical authority. That to travel beyond its boundaries, into the hinterlands of consciousness, one is threatened with death and the dismemberment that has in the past been the realms of aboriginal shamanism and is no place for a modern, civilized person. It threatens that once these realms are breached, there may be no returning to the sane world of order, structure, sanity, and civilization. It requires courage and faith to ignore the admonitions of this intelligence as its authority and powers wanes and another older more primal intelligence takes over in the deepest layers of human experience. Layers that extend beyond the reach of birth, death and historical biography.

At this point in this essay, we can utilize an esoteric branch of Christianity to guide our descent. Gnosticism, in reaction to New Testament Christianity, posited that there were lesser gods that were worshipped and could dominate the consciousness of groups of people, or even the civilized masses. After these “lesser gods” authority is exhausted, there is one god to be experienced. That god is a loving creator. A god that adores all it’s creations vegetable, animal, or human. This is the god that is encountered after all laws and decrees of the last millennia no longer holds sway on a consciousness lowering into its own depths. This is not the god Yahweh, that has ruled over Christians, Jews and Muslims for over 2,000 years, but more resembles Brahman of Hinduism. This is a god that experiences pleasure and adoration for all its creations, as it experiences all things as microcosms of itself.

This is a god that experiences itself through its creations, so how might it ever judge them as wanting, undeserving of love, or a source of dissatisfaction? This is also a god that was expressed as Hinduism developed thousands of years before the Western triumvirate of Judaism, Islam and Christianity. A religion that grew much more closely out of man’s shamanistic religious origins in a giant cultural maelstrom , than did the Old Testament which emerged from the psychological and civil demands of a rapidly forming city state.

Brahman encompasses everything physical and non physical, everything that exists before during and after this life, known and unknown, and arose in the west, in the 1960’s when Psychedelics became democratized in Western Culture. The Beatles, the avatars of all things 1960’s, turned to India, once they experienced Psychedelics. There they found an intelligence that existed beyond the borders of the Western Psyche Brahman has been there ever since. In the West’s fascination with Yoga, Meditation, Cannabis, and Psychedelics.

This is not the Intelligence that animates our thoughts and our ethics and our morality. Not the intelligence that recalls our history, our biography or of what our nervous system has perceived, and we recall since our birth. But an intelligence that formed your body, your flesh, your bones, your skin and your organs, and uncountable galaxies. The same intelligence in every cell of our body and in every atom in the universe. When we release our grasp and on intelligence of the Old and New Testament, and it releases our grasp on us, we fall into the hands of another intelligence, and this intelligence regards us differently with a loving and caring gaze that is much different than the intelligence that rules the culture we live in, and the families from which we come.